Re: Incoming in 3...2...1...0
I've yet to see "banksman" as a label of the function of anyone working lineside in the (depressingly numerous) RAIB (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) reports into trackside worker injuries and deaths.
557 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
This is the same council that, in 1997/8, decided it didn't need a new corporate HQ but could stay in County Hall (no longer in the county) and reconfigure the office space there, take on 4 hub office buildings across the county, and do hot-desking.
Small problem, they didn't realise the listing status of the building made the reconfiguration unworkable. And hot desking couldn't work as Highways, Education and Social Services were all on separate networks. Whoops. (I was a councillor, not in the majority party, at the time)
It took them another 20+ years to finally relocate into the county, as recommended by the outgoing administration in 1997.
And they got in a hotshot head of IT who had some weird "dialtone service" slogan for IT.
All agreed - bar running DHCP on "the gateway". Keep it behind there, keep the attack surface low on the gateway.
Kea DHCP sever is nice, but got a much steeper learning curve than legacy ISC DHCP. And needs payment for some useful features (resilient duplicate servers included, if memory serves)
Those of us who were around at the time, following comp.arch with utter fascination, remember the Multiflow TRACE - 125 or so sales. The book by Josh Fisher's wife is well worth reading.
Before that, we also followed the massive parallelism of the Thinking Machines range.
Arguably, both architectures suffered from compilers not delivering what was needed/promised.
The results of a few recent by-elections would suggest otherwise.
What is insane is how quickly it all gets forgotten. 1997 only achieved the result expected in 1992 thanks to the "expenses scandal". Anyone remembering that should be entirely unsurprised by the "VIP lane", rules on , external "consultancy", 2nd jobs, employing family members as Parliamentary assistants, etc., etc., being ignored.
And, even better, you can turn on loads of equipment, heaters, etc., and open all your windows when you hit a half-hour period with a negative tariff.
That's happened a few times lately on Octopus Agile. And it's not as perverse as it sounds - it can actually cost more to stop some generation systems for a short period and then restart them (think nuclear), so it makes sense to pay (less than it would cost to turn them off) for the output if it being can't go anywhere else (think Dinorwic top lake being full).
Yeah, I love that sort of sales call.
In the early 1980s I let a double glazing salesdroid into the house. He tried to tell me that most of the dust in the house comes in from outside through gaps in the windows which double glazing would fix.
I did enjoy telling him that most of it would actually be dead cells off our skin, and reducing draughts wouldn't really fix that, would it?
Now, living in a thatched place so we get loads of insects, spider poo becomes quite the issue, too :-). That, and dried mud off the dogs..... No longer living near the M25 does, at least, stop all the dust being stuck together with gluey black stuff from the diesel exhaust PM (OK, that does come in from the outside)
Mostly because the original design intent for 'C' was to provide a slightly higher level way of writing in assembler. Which is of course more like a thermonuclear weapon than a bottle of nitroglycerine. There are loads of applications written in the language that should have used almost any one, except perhaps Fortran or Basic.
However.... unsurprisingly, it's hard to write 'C' library routines in a language other then 'C'.
It's the "only" bit that's the problem. The pump to put local water tower apparently tripped out regularly, and most of the village lost their water once the water towe drained.
And then got dirty water for a few hours once it returned.
"Apparently" because I only know this from the village FB group, being on a nice reliable well-filtered and chemical-free (once the leached nitrates are removed) private water supply.....
Some of us were in the Dartford/Bexleyheath area when some scrotes set fire to the 132KV line on a cable bridge across the Darent. It was never determined whether it was a suicidal cable theft attempt or just vandalism.
Took best part of 3 days to repair, the DNO were shipping gennies from all across the UK to install in the substations.
The best part was the number of underground cables that popped over the following year or so because they'd got cold and the moisture wasn't being evaporated over that period....
And in a classic horse/stable door event, Proper Security and CCTV were subsequently installed on the cable bridge.
And Hyperflex is actually "multivendor", like so much Cisco stuff (I'm looking at you too, Firepower) with a central and critical component coming from M&A activity - in this case, Springpath.
I'm screwed by it's use of NFSv3 which leads to VMs stalling if a snapshot is removed from a different host from the running one. Somewhat screwing Druva backups. Apparently fixed by NFSv4, but the Springpath VMs don't do that.
Won't mourn it's passing
Nope, you weren't. 1984, negotiated a feed from IST (Imperial Software Technology). ukc was the main Janet hub. v22 modem, contemplated "midnight line" - a BT thing where you paid a massive line rental but calls were not charged from midnight to 6am, but given it was a local call it didn't make sense. The feed we got fitted on a 60MB drive on the 3b2.
I learnt so much from comp.arch.
Any ISP considering running a news service would, hopefully, visit demon.service where again, hopefully, the history of news.demon.co.uk can still be found
Probably the most "amusing" bit of it's disastrous early years was when the entire news spool got trashed thanks to a firmware bug on every drive in the RAID array, rendering it not at all R.
Exams, in general, test the ability to pass exams above an understanding of the subject in question.
In my academic career, up to first degree, in the 60's and early 70's, I sat one open-book exam - one of my final year modules, Electronic Circuit Design.
It was the one and only exam I ever sat that I felt tested my understanding of the subject over my ability to regurgitate facts. I've been boring on about this for the subsequent 50 years, predating the Internet by a little bit.
Of course, to set an exam that does this, the exam setter needs to be highly skilled, but you'd hope that was the case. OK, in this case, it was (then) Dr. (now Prof) Bob Spence, so that definitely applies.
As for vendor quals, don't get me started on them......
Oh, and multiple choice questions. You can game multi-choice far too easily with just a little knowledge - again, unless they're set with a high degree of skill.
I could, but why should I?
ls should have consistent display across versions. If you want colour, have a flag to turn that on, then expectations don't have to change.
Yep, I know that ship's well and truly sailed.
PS I've been using.*nix so long that grep having grown a -R flag was a comparatively recent discovery.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Microsoft, push authentication via Microsoft Authenticator has been enhanced to...... improve its defence to.... social engineering attacks.
Whilst this bit of MS blames users for being vulnerable to them.
What's bunch of d**ks
But my back's broken.
Moving 10 feet? Not the brightest idea in the world.
See, every suggestion that someone comes up with to "fix" W3W is worse than the obvious solution of not using it, but using a proper, pre-existing, geolocation system with a public location code generation algorithm